Seungbum #1 defender

yoonbum lifted his hand as well, and the man shook it firmly, all within a matter of three seconds.

"nice to meet you, i'm yang seungbae."

much like the advert, seungbae's voice had a undertone of calm that had slightly settled his nerves.

"…ready to start yoonbum?"

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I’m gonna do a full video analyzing EP9 where I will probably go even more in depth, but I desperately need to share something so painful about the parallel scenes where Jax and Pomni are falling into the cellar/abstracting.

Starting with Pomni’s scene, her hand is actively outstretched and she generally looks terrified. Even without the context of the scene prior, it’s very clear this someone who wants help, someone who is fighting to stay around. Another thing that I think most people might miss is that she is facing the screen, not for the fact that we can see how terrified she is but the fact we can even see her face at all. This is probably very anecdotal but something I’ve picked up on in a few different medias is that when a character dies, their face is not shown or is at least turned away from the camera. The best example I can think at the moment is the cornucopia bloodbath scene in the hunger games, I think it’s for suspended disbelief or tension but the character is almost never alive when this happens. 

Jax, on the other hand, is falling like a bag of rocks, just completely limp. His neither of his arms are stretched upwards, he is not actively outstretching his hand, nor is he looking at the camera. To put it bluntly, he does kinda just look like a dead body falling. When I was first watching this, I knew at this point he was not going to be saved. Not only in that moment was he gone, but he’d been gone. There’s was no chance Pomni was going to be able to save him, her last chance to do that was when he tried to talk to her but then backed away. While you have one person who wants the help and another who doesn't, you also have someone who's struggles were caught in time and then someone who's struggles were hidden or went unnoticed until it was too late to do anything.

Given all this, I found it interesting when I went to see other’s opinion on the scene of Jax falling and Pomni reaching for him and saw that people genuinely thought Pomni was going to save him if she hadn’t been stopped. This leads me to my point, I really don’t think Pomni went into Jax’s mind in the attempt to save him, given that Goose has stated that abstraction is irreversible and Jax is very much gone as shown in the falling scene. I think it better represents her attempting to deal with grief, sitting with it, trying to find closure, or at worse, letting it consume her. The whole doors scene feels like funeral, like hearing stories from others that you didn’t know about someone until after they pass. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Hearing and seeing that everyone has their own idea and version of who that person was, those versions only being fragments of the full person.

Alongside her falling with him, her hugging him even as he started to glow was about not being able to let go and not accepting that he’s abstracted. She was absolutely willing to go with him and the fact she begins to glitch, which we know is painful, and still doesn’t let go really sells that to me if we view glitching as a metaphor for grief. Also, maybe I’m reaching but him glowing was very much giving “going towards the light”, take that as you will. The scene where she’s pulled away from Jax by the others harks back to Pomni's initial falling scene, where the others grab her hand and stop her from falling into the cellar, falling into grief, and stopping her from abstracting too. The others help take on her grief rather than letting her deal with it alone, not letting it consume her and taking on the task of making room for it, literally.

This whole sequence is about grief and Pomni's inability to let Jax go. Pomni getting pulled back from his abstraction, from falling into the cellar with him, is about how grief is not something you deal with alone and about how easily grief can take you too if you allow it.

Hot Take:

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I don’t think Jax’s abstraction should’ve been on screen.

There’s something about the idea of watching someone essentially fully commit suicide or go into a rough mental place that doesn’t sit right with me.

Plus we already got a good glimpse of it in episode 7, you kind of already know what goes on in the mind of someone about to enter that state.